Chapter 4

Lucia's POV

By the second night, I’d stopped expecting the hut to be empty.

I came up the path with my arms full and my back aching, and the warm glow of my own window startled me all over again. Marty was still there. Healing. Eating my food. Taking up my floor.

And for the first time in my life, someone needed me. Not because I was useful for scrubbing floors or cleaning up bodies, but because I had saved him.

The loneliest part of my life had a person in it now, and somehow that made me matter.

Last night I’d have called that dangerous. A stranger I didn’t know, an outsider wolf my pack would punish me for hiding. I still knew all of that was true. But I was prouder of having saved a life.

That evening, the work crew had been buzzing about something as I slipped past their ration crates. “The Lycan Prince—missing since last night. No one knows where he is.” “These are troubled times, that’s for sure.”

I kept my head down, skimmed three bread rolls off the crate when no one was looking, wrapped them in a rag, and shoved them down the front of my dress.

I set them on the table and tried not to feel ashamed of them.

Marty picked one up. He turned it over, pressed his thumb into it, and frowned. The roll didn’t give. It was a day old and going green at one edge, and against his hand it looked like exactly what it was.

"You eat this？" he asked. It wasn't a question, but it wanted to be one.

"Tonight I do." I dropped into the chair across from him. "The grave detail puts me near the ration crate. Most weeks I'm not." I shrugged. "Some weeks it's whatever I find in the woods. Berries. Roots, if I'm lucky."

He looked at the roll a while longer. Then he tore it in half and ate it anyway, green edge and all, without a single word of complaint. He kept his eyes on me the whole time he did it, and he did not look away.

He went very still. "How long has it been like this?"

I should have laughed it off. Instead the whole story came out of me, quiet and flat.

I'd stopped crying about it a long time ago.

I told him about being left at the pack's edge as a baby, a wolfless thing with no name and no scent that nobody could place. About the foster house that fed me last and worked me first. About the years of cleared plates I was never allowed to fill, and the winters I learned which tree bark you could boil to trick a stomach into feeling full.

I told him about Olivia, who'd decided before either of us could walk that I was the pack's shame to kick whenever the mood took her.

Marty listened without moving. The longer I talked, the harder his jaw set.

"Your Alpha is a disgrace." He said it cold, and certain, with the weight of someone used to judging Alphas. "A pack that starves any member and calls it discipline isn't a pack."

“But I'm not going to let them push me around my whole life.”

“If they bully you again, I'll stand up for you,” he said flatly.

I couldn't help but laugh.

“That's a generous promise from a man still sleeping on my floor.” I shook my head.

Something flickered across his face. For a moment, that cold, indifferent look vanished, replaced by a serious expression—as if words were stuck in his throat, almost spilling out but swallowed back down. His lips pressed together, and his Adam's apple bobbed.

But soon enough, he leaned back against the wall and said flatly, “Fine. Let's hope there never comes a day when I need to.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I can change things on my own. I have a plan. The Healer's Trial.” I picked at the edge of the table. “Once I pass both rounds and get my license, I'll find a decent job somewhere no one's ever heard my name. I've been saving up for this for years.”

"You think you'll pass." Not mocking. Measuring.

"I know the theory cold. Every herb, every fever, every poison in the old books." I hesitated. "I've just never treated a real wolf before. My pack won't let a wolfless near a sick one. They think a girl with no wolf of her own couldn't possibly understand a wolf's body." A breath. "You're the first werewolf I've ever actually healed. The only proof I have that I'm not fooling myself."

He was quiet a moment. Then, dry: "Then consider me your practice."

I blinked. "Yesterday, you wouldn't even admit I was your Healer. Or that you were my patient."

"You hadn't fed me stale bread from the front of your dress yesterday." The corner of his mouth twitched. "You saved my life. I can grant you one small thing."

I told myself it was practical. I needed the practice; he needed the dressing changed. Both true.

I knelt beside him and reached for the bandage. "Shirt off. Let me see it."

He pulled the borrowed shirt over his head without a word.

And every clever, clinical thought went straight out of my head.

I'd seen the wound a dozen times. I had not, somehow, let myself see the rest of him: Broad shoulders like beams, a solid and well-proportioned chest, abdominal muscles cut as cleanly as if by a knife.

The old scars that said he'd survived worse than this. The chest I'd pressed my bare hand flat against two mornings ago, when I'd woken curled into his side like he was mine to curl into.

Heat climbed up my neck. I kept my eyes on the bandage with everything I had.

The wound was closing clean, pink and healthy at the edges, the black gone out of the veins around it. Good work, if I said so myself. I peeled the old dressing, wiped the skin down, reached for fresh wrapping. Ordinary work. My hands knew it in their sleep.

But his eyes were on me. Not looking at the wound. Looking at me. A slow, heavy gaze that followed my fingers as I worked. I tried to ignore it, tried to focus on the clean white wrap, but the air between us had gone thick and warm.

His chest rose under my knuckles. Just a breath, but I felt it. Felt the heat of his skin through the thin layer of gauze. My hand hesitated for half a second over his ribs.

"Your hands are cold," he said. His voice was low, almost idle.

They weren't. My hands were burning.

I didn't answer. I pressed the bandage down, perhaps harder than necessary, and his stomach tightened under my palm. A muscle jumped somewhere low in his abdomen.

So I had no explanation for what came next.

My heart was going too fast, knocking against my ribs, and as it sped up, something inside me answered. A warmth that wasn't the warmth in my hands. Deeper than that. A slow, strange pull rising under my skin in time with my pulse, reaching toward him like it had somewhere to be.

I pulled back as if I'd been burned.

"You're done," I said, too fast.

He looked at me, faintly puzzled. I didn't meet his eyes. I busied myself with the wrappings, with anything that wasn't the warm gold of him watching me.

What was that? My healing had never done that. My heart had never done that. Nothing in my whole careful, locked-down life had ever done that.

What was wrong with me since this man walked into it?